


ET's Guide to Strife

by epitomizedTyrant



Category: Homestuck, SBURB Glitch FAQ
Genre: (in)FAQ, Replay Value AU, Strategy guide of complaints
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 13:06:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3897478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epitomizedTyrant/pseuds/epitomizedTyrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quick rundown of the Strife deck, SBurbs "combo" system, and Alchemizing OP items.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, just a warning, this is sort of Ramble-ey. intentionally so, but, eh.

epitomizedTyrant’s Guide to Weapon Kinds, Combo’s, OverPowering, and Aspect Attack’s.

 

I’m sure that everyone who is reading this has at some point glanced through their Strife catalogue. Maybe you did it early and never looked at it again. Maybe you know every weapon by heart.  
No matter how or when or why you looked there is one thing that has remained static through all (my) sessions. there are eight pages of weapons. I WON”T BE COVERING EVERYTHING. I have used more than the usual amount on my playthroughs because weapon cycleing is pretty fun. So before we really kick things off I want to turn your attention to a few things.  
First let me lay out my shitty names for them, whihc is to say all the things I call Sub-Strata. Your first and largest substrata is your GenStrata. Swords, Knives, Guns, Whips, Chainsaws, Polearms, Hand-Axes, etc. this is the first page you can see, as well as the next two. Any of these weapons can be accessed from the start, they simply aren’t all visible. Also I think more are unlockable, but that’s because of some weirdness involving a piece of biotech a coplayer found. Anyone know why there is no normal pistolkind? I've seen Dual-weld versions, but NEVER singles. Anyway.  
Next you have the SpecStrate. This is the smallest, and for some reason is in the middle layer. Now you may be wondering why this is odd, or even bad, in a game that is so plagued by utter and pure what the fuck glitches to even warrant mention. Well, you see these weapons are special or as some might say Unique Drops. The Peregrine Paragon Rifle that rarely drops from the boss of a very specific Space Land Dungeon, the Vainglorious Vanguard dagger that can be found in one of the first hidden dungeons bosses (a “static” dungeon), the snaky thing, you know, the one that takes two fucking hours to find? The one with Irradiated Irises? THE ONLY DOOM ASPECT BOSS IN THE EARLY GAME?  
That’s right there is a special section set aside for the twenty three unique LPOS. They even got their own sprites. Unlike the zweihander-kind, I might add. Seriously, most of them don’t even look like normal swords. Ugh. Well speaking of zweihander kind…

TIER TWO WEAPONRY

 

So, you might be thinking “I’ve never heard of these “tiers before” or “Now your making shit up!” It’s called taxonomy, sod off. Anyway. A tier two weapon is anything that takes over x mangrit (sorry, I cant remember if theres a female or neutral version of that. in a hurry, maybe I’ll look later.). Now you know that Zwei-kind cheats, knights can use them early, but other tier two kinds such as WarAxekind(why war axe? Its seriously the difference between a fire axe and a double bladed head? They aren’t even that much heavier.) and HammerKind (no not the normal hammerkind, no I don’t know why they have the same name, yes, these things are huge and heavy) . In fact, you will notice lots of repeated kinds. Sometimes you naturally progress in to them, such as the point where your chainsaw has four inch long menacing teeth and sounds like a tank passing through. It also probably weighs a ton. what im saying is that these are the big and heavy weapons. As you will soon learn however, these aren’t the craziest weapons in the game.  
So with that teensy bit of coverage we come to:  
THE GIGA STRATA  
Geuss what this is. no seriously geuss. Can't do it? Well This is the last “evolution” tier. Im talking about the Axes with nine feet of handle and four foot wide heads. The chainsaw with the seven foot blade. Dual wielding Zweihanders, The fucking FLAK KANNON that’s mounted on a chainsaw grip(not the automatic one, the one with the fifty millimeter bore that’s basically a gigantic explosion based shotgun(Which makes it different because the explosions are bigger and there are more of them)).  
You probably won’t get one of these before you start grinding in Atomik Ebonpyres, but even if you do (one in six hundred on the first ogre boss and then not again until dungeon four under the consort questline according to bastardRelay) you’re going to need a Metric Shit Ton of Mangrit. Void players and Heirs, eat your hearts out.

We are ignoring alchemy for a bit, because alchemized items run the spectrum from lpos to OP shit.

Anyway as you know Abilities are tied to individual items, and there are no kind wide abilities worth mentioning.

So with Gen, Spec, T-2, and Giga covered, what are the last two? Well, one is normal, and one is only visible because of a glitch. Lets do the glitch first, even though technically it comes last.  
Aspect Strata  
These are not technically weapons, but rather a set of effects that get attached to weapons. Now I know that you are thinking “but new aspects are found everyday!” and “if this was always visible how come we don’t have everything catalogued” well if you would hush up for a god damned moment you would know. Come on I’m trying to help you out. I know it seems like a load of horse shit but what exactly were you expecting?  
These are a page of blank strife sprites.

This next part is a little anecdote and is totes skippable. 

Then how do I know they are aspect cards? Funny little story, see I was a flow player again last go round and I thought it might be fun to infuse lemons with Doom and Flow. While I was dicking around with that I noticed whenever a picked up the lemons my strife changed to Grenade kind. But first two blank cards popped up. I just happened to be throwing the lemon (which was apparently a live napalm grenade) up and catching it when I opened my Strife Deck and saw the card switch. So I flipped through the deck and sure enough, two blanks paces were selected. So I tossed it again. Two different white spaces were selected, which leads me to postulate that the visible page of the deck is a random assortment of effects. no idea how many there are though  
TLDR- It’s a page of empty tiles which get assigned aspects when you equip items but are empty the rest of the time. As in undefined.

 

Anyway, last but far from least…

 

Non-Standard Strata

Okay, goddamn that’s a bad name. Ill figure out a better one later. So anyway, now we come to the oddball stuff, things that fit the idea of weaponry in the vaguest way possible. The various melee iterations, from fistkind to armorkind, environment based stuff, such as quakekind and chargekind, things you aren’t likely to think of as weapons like lampkind, desktopkind, corded-controller kind (includes keyboard).  
Now even amongst these you will notice oddballs. Lets look at dronekind. 

Expectation: you control a drone from a laptop or computer.  
What you get: Drone companion(s) who carry a variety of weapons and, apart from following you, seem to have basic freewill. Its fun, it can be part of a multi-kind mash-up, and can include up to eight drones. Awesome right? For once in SBurb, yes, it is awesome. Now we look to the ever-present caveat. They are RIDICULOUSLY hard to get the first time. As with most weapons there is a base weapon. This is required for crafting any other drones. How do you get this? Good news is it can be obtained from the start of the game. Bad news is it only drops from a very specific and rare enemy. That’s right, its time to farm some granite ogres. It’s a 2% drop chance, so it may take fifty to a hundred kills on a miniboss sized monster. Hope you love your fray motif. As usual if you equip the basic drone before getting the ultimate reward you can keep it into the next game, so it only has to be farmed once. Although that once is from a powerful and rare monster, that is only found in Sunslammers and Tribals. Good luck.  
Note that drones you can buy on your planet won’t work here and can be assigned to laptop or desktop kind.

Puppetkind  
Expectation: The puppet will be your stand in fighter which you control.  
What you get: a puppet with which to hit things. Yay. The specibus card is surprisingly rare. The puppets drop often enough o become vendor trash at consort pawnshops. Gratz.

 

Next up are two of my favorites. Wheelkind and Joykind. No these aren’t using wheels and emotions. Yes they are abysmally named. Like all kinds. Wheelkind is what you use when you want to not only be able to captchalogue cars, but also what you use to turn them into weapons. Allow me to elucidate. I believe TVTropes refers to it as “Car-Fu”. Referred, sorry. Anyway, you know have a two ton hunk of steel that will no longer suffer engine trouble, will never run out of gas, and can be equipped with turrets, ramming targes, boosters, and anything else you can think of.  
Note: The “Other Car” is not a prius. Or a Porsche. Or anything meant to be gazed upon by the eyes of mortals.  
Of course they are useless in dungeons and normal lands. Great for l^3 and l*6 lands though. See benevolentMalcontent’s guide if you have only encountered normal lands.  
So with that in mind guess again for joykind. That’s right, helicopters, planes, and for some reason motorcycles. If anyone knows whats up with that please enlighten me.  
Anyway, these can be useful for fighting colossal in the meridian, or exploring skaia in games with the x^3 multiplier. I will preempt your next question by telling you that there is a one in eight chance to spawn one of these lands, and if you have had one before you are four times as likely to have one again. Eventually you always get these. Before you start looking forward to it, remember a game of SBurb can take up to six years. These can take twenty. 

Ill let that sink in.

Moving on.

That kinda wraps it up for the overview, ill get into the other stuff next time.


	2. C-C-C-Combo Refrance!

I want to preface this by saying that I am one of those people drifting around paradox who shouldn't be writing guides, but sometimes we do things we shouldn't. I for one failed to realize this had a rich text editor. So yeah, yay me.

So. Combos are awesome. Wham bam triple combos, yadda yadda. At first glance SBurbs combos system seems surprisingly… sane. It is basically stagger locking. You hit the imp, and then hit it again before it can attack. As long as you don’t get hit for more than 11% of your VIT you’ll continue the combo, your damage will get higher and higher, everything is peachy. It even carries between enemies. And there are ways for teammate to join in. Wait you say you have never noticed a damage boost? What do you mean of course its there, look. Every combo is worth….

Wait for it.

Waaaait for it….

A 0.15% increase. As in 2= 0.15% 3=0.1725 …. And so on. Wow. Good job. Maybe this was another ~ath typo? Although if the~ath was really written and designed by someone… The question must be asked, did they work on Skate 3? Not that I’ve ever played it, just heard stories. Ive tried to alchemize a copy but all I get is Tony Hawk. FFfffff. So now you are likely wondering, why bring it up at all? Is this even relevant? Do you even have a point here? Well calm that calamity and let me explain.

All can be made good… well, adequate, with: Combo Modifiers!

But how do you get these elusive modififers? Well its simple. Like everything else in the universe. Honestly the question is, do we start in Weenie ville, or do we hop to the Badass Junction of Badassitude? I geuss for the sake of suspense and clarity, weenie ville it is.

Do you like rhythm games? No? me neither, but as usual Sburb is busy giving no shits. The simplest and earliest involves fraymotifs. Wow what a surprise. Bet no one sees where this is going. Simply attack in time with the beat, each successive hit gets you more damage per hit, a reasonable amount actually despite stacking rather than multiplying, and getting ten perfect beats in a row gives a massive triple attack bonus on your next hit. Actually watching someone do this is crazy badass, I mean its like a dance of death. I watched a Rain player do this in an Atomyk Ebonpyre once. It was like a flash mob of slaughter. And everyone looked the same. And then apparently they all counted toward the same counter because the enemies just kind of… splattered. As in when she stabbed them, with a daggerkind of all things they popped. Everywhere.

So as if the rhythm combo wasn’t enough (it really wasn’t all considered) there is the Emphatic Imperil. Actually called that not even joking, god this game has some shitty names. I mean plenty are of the names are cool, like the Ebonpyres and alchemy stuff, but then you get to this bit and its like, did they stop trying? Anyway basically you attack when a cool part of a motif comes up. So how awesome is this? First you kind of have to give it style points because when you get one and do a special it looks fucking badass. So how useful is it in terms of damage? Well it has all previous bonuses applied to it, plus it in itself a one thousand percent multiplier. The idea here was (probably) a heroic smite on powerful enemies, but it usually winds up being overkill or not nearly enough. Because life, the universe, and SBurb. Thanks Finagle.

That all being said, AOE attacks up to and including attacks like Wrath of The Storm God get bonuses. Which is pretty cool, but Flow players miss out here because Pyrocumulous skips damage calc and vaporizes everything. As in ALL the things. I think this also applies to the Doom and Space Berserk abilities, because nukes, but I’ve never tested this. Don’t worry Flow players, I know everyone loves Pyrocumulous but we more than make up for the loss.

A similar concept is riffing. Your fray motif got a crazy as shit (whatever) solo? Now is the time to go to town. You basically get high combos for extreme violence. Why is this here? I mean, it kinda cool and useful but, thematically speaking, what the fuck? I guess no one is usually paying attention to the nomenclature during combat but still.

Anyway, I’m gonna give a quick rundown of specific combos here, because they all have the same ten percent multiplier and are relatively simple. They are basically low tricks in skate games, like different versions of an Ollie. I don’t even know what that means.  
A little note here, these names only come up in code and are courtesy of an old FAq that never came back up after the crash, so I assume the writer is dead, Skaia bless their soul.

Headshots: consecutive Critical hits. Yes its called headshots when about 50% of the creatures don’t have crit spots on their heads. I don’t know, not my fault.  
Instakills: Exactly what it says on the tin. Mostly used on imps, especially on mook master/maker bosses. Actually legit useful there.

Weapon specific: When you obtain one of these the next attack is the one that gets the bonus. No bonuses get applied during the chain or chain breaker.  
Lancekind Impaler: boosts damage after impaling multiple enemies on a lance. Doubles if they included imps.  
Sweep: got a weapon with a long blade? Killing a bunch of enemies with one swing nets a twenty percent bonus for each enemy killed after one. As in killing four enemies is a 60% bonus.  
Absolute Teamwork: This is what its called. What does it have to do with its subject? NOTHING. I was seething a bit while I wrote this the first time, so yeah. There are a lot of things to hate about SBurb. The badly alchemised food, the insane land gen, the constant fear of purposeless death, the fact that Absolute Teamwork is a bonus for missing. A lot. Exclusively applied to guns. And somehow, it knows when you miss on purpose. Fuck this modifier. Fuck it to hell. You literally have to be terrible at guns to get this modifier. I get it, its supposed to build tension and make it meaningful when you finally kill something. But godDAMN it is frustrating that this exists.

These are the ones you see most often. Hey, future me you lazy ass, come back and add more stuff yea? Also, format this to look better, I’m busy.

Anyway, I want to talk about THE best combos ever. This is the fun stuff, so lets get started. First get at least three strife decks loaded with your favorite weapons. Now, get out your most frenetic Fraymotif, got it? Now I would advise using the fraymixer to make a good ten hour version of this if you play as flow. Actually if you rolled flow, toss in your top five and make ten days long. I know, it’s a bit of work, but it is worth it. Now go to a good battlefield, make sure your ready to roll your abilities out constantly, and make sure that you have enough empty sylladex space to grab every drop so you don’t have to think about it. Got all that? Now grab weapon one, kill some stuff, swap to your second, kill more stuff, third, kill stuff, wrap around to one, kill, two, kill, and it don’t stop. Cycle your weapons constantly to build one of the best combo varieties ever. There is nothing not to like here, you practice with three different weapons at once, you deal massive damage, and it looks badass. My personal favorite loadout is [Axekind](giga if possible for easy sweeps)[Chainsawkind](by which I mean a chainsaw grip flamethrower. Got have one long range weapon right?)[Swordkind/PIstolkind](duel weild because it counts for two on the chain bonus counter.) By day three you should be able to one shot COLOSSALS. By day five you should be able do headbutt them once to pop them. By day five… well, NOTHING can withstand a hit.  
Of course stopping for 41 seconds instantly clears the chain board. Oh well.

 

I hope future me adds stuff. Anyway, does anyone know why so few guides got reposted after the crash? Or even what caused it? Is anyone even using this server anymore?

I think, I may be wrong, but I think we had a headcount once. Of, you know. Who was out there. Maybe, and I know I’m usually quiet on here, but maybe we should do it again? Just to see.

**Author's Note:**

> If i contradict any other guides/faqs, sorry. this is partially made to set up a different thing I'm working on so, yeah.
> 
> (how do i indent paragraphs? thats still a thing right? indentation? a thing i should do?)


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